


stanley uris takes a shower

by ladymemebeth



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Deadlights (IT), Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Mentioned Maturin | The Turtle, Stanley Uris Lives, Trauma, cosmic knowledge and its consequences, i genuinely don't know what this is i wrote this while waiting for a delayed subway at 2am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22872556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymemebeth/pseuds/ladymemebeth
Summary: He hadn't ever forgotten, not really. Even thirteen-hundred miles and twenty-seven years away, Stanley remembered.Something happened to me a long time ago,he would tell her.And when I come back from Maine I think I'll finally have the words to tell you about it.
Relationships: Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 1
Kudos: 28





	stanley uris takes a shower

**Author's Note:**

> this was partially inspired by [a post by honeyreynolds](https://honeyreynolds.tumblr.com/post/190869505418/please-hit-us-with-that-headcanon-about-the-losers) that i cannot stop thinking about re: stan having gained complete knowledge of the entire universe when he saw the deadlights in pennywise's mouth.
> 
> not tagged for graphic depictions of violence but there is inevitably a lot of talk about the trauma associated with the clown, and also an allusion to suicide, hence the teen rating.

He hadn't ever forgotten, not really. Even thirteen-hundred miles and twenty-seven years away, Stanley remembered. Not faces, not names, not even moments—it was a feeling that he carried inside himself always. A sensation, perhaps, like being able to remember that he'd forgotten to do something but he couldn't put his finger on what that something actually was. The sense of impending doom characteristic of a heart attack, a lifelong symptom that didn't seem to correlate with anything else in his life. 

Of course he remembered the fear. He didn’t know if anyone could forget a fear like that. 

But he remembered the love, too, its presence a fluttering bird on his shoulder. Someone else might have called it a guardian angel but Stanley just thought of it as an unnamed comfort. When Mike Hanlon called him on the telephone, he suddenly had a voice to assign to that love, and something within him began to breathe again. 

When he pulled back from inside Its throat he hadn't been able to see anything except the sunspots of the deadlights burnt into his retinas. That was what made him panic first, afraid that he had gone blind. And then Bill came into focus and he could feel Eddie's small hand on his arm and the whole world narrowed and then blew open impossibly wide, like the jaws of something from another dimension. 

It was difficult for him as a kid. Thirteen-year-old boys were not meant to live with the kind of primordial knowledge he had encountered in the deadlights. It aged him prematurely, more so than he already was, Stanley always with the stick up his ass about curfew or college even when such concerns were only glimmers on the horizon. How do you tell your friends—even the ones you will love forever, who you know would die for you—that you’d been made privy to the whole of the universe? It was a chaos beyond comprehension, and it scared him. He didn't know how Abraham and Noah hadn't died of it, crushed beneath the weight of their cosmic awareness. 

That was the one thing that It took from him that he knew he could never forgive; his faith had been replaced by a different kind of belief system. The only true constants from that summer forward were time and death and always a tremendous fear, blurred together into an insistent ache in his head, his jaw, his fucking teeth. And hadn't that just been the icing on the cake in addition to everything else: slipping away from his family, his Rabbi father, no longer able to see the world as he had always been taught, as he had always been so eager to believe. That was a loss he was never able to communicate to his friends, another entry on the ever-growing list of things he could not articulate to the people he held closest to his heart, another wall mortared with cynicism. He was so angry sometimes as a teenager, smacked in the face by bouts of rage that he tried to convince himself weren’t about blame but always inevitably returned to the thought, which he desperately pushed away: I’m this way because of It. I’m this way because of them. 

It wasn’t fair to think that way, he knew. And then the anger would turn inwards at himself, a fury he had only ever experienced elsewhere in the teeth of It.

He almost asked Beverly about it in high school, on one of her visits from her aunt’s when they all got royally fucked up to celebrate. She was the only other one who had seen the deadlights even if she hadn't also been nearly swallowed alive in the process. _I know you know that I know,_ he slurred once, head full of fog. _I know you know_ what _I know._ And Bev had looked at him for a long time before taking a hit off the joint in her hand and shotgunning it directly into Stan’s mouth, her hand gentle on his chin.

Moving away from Derry had helped dissolve some of that anger and cynicism. Meeting Patty had helped even more, and for a while he thought he could outrun it entirely. He had worked very hard all his life to get away from that feeling, to steel himself against the seemingly sourceless tarpit of memory that lurked just beyond the reach of his consciousness. He had dreams that made waking feel like a release, a gasp of air after being held underwater, dreams he found difficult to recall later in the morning. They were almost always dimly-lit and populated by shadowy figures, but every so often as he came up from under the water he would catch a glimpse of some bright warm thing, and a sea turtle would float past so that it was the last image in his mind before he opened his eyes. 

There were givens in life, things that had simple explanations. He liked puzzles because he liked putting their pieces together. He liked birds because their bones are hollow and that's why they can fly. He loved Patty because her warmth had always been the strongest deterrent against the feeling. She was unafraid of time, letting the minute and hour hands glance off of her like arrows too dull to pierce skin.

Stanley realized that he would have to tell her, and that their lives would be different after he did. The hazy film of dread that had taken root in his mind would crystallize into real memories; the vague sensations would shift into scenes with sharply-contoured edges that would press into his skin and try to claw him back down into that pit. Into that hole in the earth under the Neibolt house, its dilapidated exterior abruptly materializing in his mind as Mike spoke to him from an entire coastline away, his voice as kind and as clear as it had been in adolescence. He knew that she would love him anyway, because that was something at which Patty would always excel: loving him particularly but also loving the world at large, even though Stan suspected that both he and the world were not entirely deserving of that love. He knew all this because he had always known, in a way, that it—whatever it was, whatever It may be—would all come back someday. 

_Something happened to me a long time ago,_ he would tell her. _And when I come back from Maine I think I'll finally have the words to tell you about it._ She would trust him, skeptical and worried and insisting on nightly phone calls while he was away. But still she would trust him because she loved him with a kind of love that Stanley only felt one other time in his life, held trembling in the bodies of seven kids scared shitless. 

So when Patty handed the telephone to him and he heard Mike's voice, he had not been surprised or even confused the way he would find out the others had been. He felt exactly how anyone might feel upon hearing from a very old friend: recognition, a puzzle piece slipping into place. 

It was an awareness of death, Stanley realized as he stared at the phone in his hand, after Mike had hung up. That's what had haunted him his whole life: the immensity of death and a kind of urgency about it, the knowledge that his trajectory towards the end of his life was somehow more pointed than everyone else’s, his mortality always just beneath the surface of everything he did. There were givens in life, things that had simple explanations, and things that were givens despite having no explanation at all. His scars which still circled his face, faint pockmarks at his hairline and under his jaw, whose origin he could never explain to people when they asked. 

He remembered what it was that he had forgotten he had to do. 

Patty asked him who was on the phone and he told her the truth: an old friend. Someone I haven’t seen in a while. He kissed the top of her head, where her hair parted in soft waves down her back, and then the pulse in her neck, where she was warm and alive. He told her he was going to the bathroom to wash up before bed.

"You're not my friend," he screamed at all six of them knelt on the wet ground beside him, unaware of the blood spilling down his face because the greater pain was coming from inside his head, threatening explosion. But they _were_ his friends; they were his and he was theirs in a way that existed outside the bounds of language and geography and time. He made them mix their blood, as if those shared cells could somehow carry within them the gravity of what he had seen. He had the whole infinity of their lives under his skin. They just didn't know to what extent, the exhaustion of carrying all the knowledge he would never be able to put down. They didn’t know because he hadn’t told them. He thought he would be able to tell them now, afterwards. 

In a different version of this life, there was no afterwards. Stan climbed into the bathtub and didn't come back out. That was what he had always known, the nag of it all; elsewhere in some parallel dimension, it had all already happened and that was what he was remembering. In this version, Stanley turned on the shower and looked at himself in the mirror until his reflection became obscured by condensation. 

As he scrubbed soap over his arms, Stan thought about the thirteen-year-old boy who had washed the blood out of his hair while crouched over the lip of the bathtub in his parents’ beautiful quiet home, crying and laughing intermittently as shampoo ran down his forearms because his brain kept short-circuiting each time he closed his eyes and saw everything all over again. After that he had never been young. 

Their names came back to him as he stood in the shower, one by one, and then their faces, each like a stab of heat from inside his chest. He pressed his forehead against the wet tile and cried like he had as a child because he had always been afraid but he had also always been loved. Both were givens. He hadn't ever forgotten, not really. He turned the shower off, still sniffling, and reached for his neatly-folded towel. Several states away, a phone rang in Chicago.

Stanley stepped out of the tub and went to go pack his suitcase. 

**Author's Note:**

> [i'm on tumblr.](https://holdoncallfailed.tumblr.com/)


End file.
